Category: Personal
I got the following email from Barry Schuler this morning. We’ve known each other for many years, and he’s one of my favorite VCs to work with.
He described exactly how I feel this morning. The fall is my favorite season of the year. By labor day, I’m ready for summer to end. The stretch until Thanksgiving is my most productive time of year.
I finally feel like writing again after a summer off (most of my books come out in the late spring / early summer, so I’m fried and uninterested in writing during the summer.)
My running is almost always great in the fall. I end the summer in solid shape and usually ramp up a lot in the fall. I like shorter days, later sunrises, and early sunsets. I like the colors of the leaves. The cool, crisp Colorado mornings.
Amy and I had a good summer, but I’m ready for cooler weather and a different pace.
“Turn off the TV and go outside and play.”
I expect these are words that have been said in almost every household in America.
Amy and I hit the bottom of the TV barrel last week while watching Army of the Dead. It was so awful it was good. But it was awful.
And … It’s June 1 and I’m done for the summer. No TV until Labor Day weekend. And then, maybe no TV after that.
TV is a weird construct since I can watch videos on my laptop or my iPad. But, that’s a different thing, since they are generally short and a deliberate thing that I’m watching on video, vs. just vegging out in front of the TV watching whatever we found on Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV, or whatever we eventually found surfing around on DirecTV (last night’s movie was Drive.)
While I was totally fried this weekend from the cumulative working and running I had done the preceding few weeks, I would have been better off napping or reading during the movie time. And, while I know there is a new wave of stuff coming out this summer, I’m going to assume that Army of the Dead sets the tone so I’ll wait until the fall in case anything good makes it through and then watch it then.
For now, I’m spending my TV time running, reading, writing, or just enjoying being outside with Amy and Cooper.
Welcome to summertime.
It has been a long winter. Really long. From my perspective, winter has been about 17 months, going back to November 2019. The Covid crisis started just as spring 2020 was beginning. As a result, winter continued through the spring, summer, and fall. And then, well, winter …
I took a half-week vacation last week. I planned for a Q1 vacation, but I had some stuff on Monday and some more stuff on Wednesday, so I just decided to start my vacation on Thursday. I went off the grid, had Amy drive me to Superior, and spent Thursday and Friday running in the mountains back to my house in Longmont. I did an easy run on Saturday and then drove to Waterton Canyon early Sunday and went for a long run there. Between runs, I read a bunch of books and napped.
Being outside on the trails cleared my head and let me completely reset. It’s beautiful in Colorado right now, and even though there continues to be a lot of trauma everywhere, I’m letting my paranoid optimist take over and embrace that we finally are once again in springtime, which is my favorite time of year.
I no longer subscribe to many daily email newsletters, but I’ve kept a few. My favorite to wake up to is Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic.
Today’s headline was It’s Possible to Tune These Things Out but it linked to an older post titled The True Power Behind Stoic “Indifference”.
At morning coffee a while ago, Amy and I had a long conversation about the phrase “I don’t care.” I struggled to explain what I was trying to say and how it was often misunderstood when I said it. Through her reaction and feedback, she helped me better understand what people heard when I said “I don’t care.”
I tried shifting to the phrase “I’m indifferent” instead of “I don’t care.” I continued to feel that I was being misunderstood when I said this. I’d often provide strengths and weaknesses of each option presented but then end with “I’m indifferent.” I knew that this was confusing to some, but I didn’t know why until I read The True Power Behind Stoic “Indifference”.
Of all the loaded words in Stoic philosophy, “indifferent” is one of the most provocative. Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus each tell us that the Stoic is indifferent to external things, indifferent to wealth, indifferent to pain, indifferent to winning, indifferent to hope and dreams and everything else. You hear it enough times and it starts to sound like these people don’t care about anything. Especially since the modern definition of the word means precisely that. But this is a dangerous misreading.
Recently, I got feedback from several people that I was profoundly unhelpful in a particular situation by saying, “I’m indifferent.” I thought about it on a run, which is unusual for me as I rarely focus on one thing during a run but prefer to let my brain go all over the place. In this particular situation, my brain seemed to lock down on the dissonance around this phrase.
The situation in question had two paths: A and B. I had a modest preference for A, but I was good with either A and B. I had explained this, but when asked which I preferred, I said, “I’m indifferent.”
After my run, I explained this more clearly, reiterating that I had a modest preference for A but was good with either A or B. Instead of “indifference,” I stated that I was “tranquil.” After even more reflection, I think a better concept would have been “equanimity.”
Back to the The True Power Behind Stoic “Indifference”.
The Stoics were not indifferent in that sense at all, it’s that they were good either way. It’s not that they didn’t care, it’s that they were good either way. Does that make sense? The point was to be strong enough that there wasn’t a need to need things to go in a particular direction. Seneca for his part would say that obviously it’s better to be rich than poor, tall than short, but the Stoic was indifferent when fate actually dealt out its hand on the matter. Because the Stoic was strong enough to make good of it—whatever it was.
Boom. After reading this, I got the disconnect people were having, which was reinforced by the contemporary view of equating “I’m indifferent” to “I don’t care,” which is very different from “I’m good either way.”
Think of that today, that it’s not about apathy or even a lack of expectation. It’s simply the quiet strength of not needing a preference, because you’re that strong.
Ryan – thanks again for helping me understand myself a little better.
Two of my favorite men on planet Earth have birthdays today.
Happy birthday Dad.
Happy birthday Dave.
I’ve learned an incredible amount from each of you. And, given all the time the three of us have spent together, from both of you.
One of the best things I’ve learned from each of you is a love of wide-open physical spaces. Dad – I’m so glad you and Mom created Woodcreek Ranch.
Dave – thank you for all the 14ers. I hope to climb many more with you.
Even though we’ve spent a lot of time together as a threesome, one, in particular, stands out. We had a Feld Technologies board retreat in the fall of 1987. I remember the date because it was during the Bork confirmation hearing. We spent the time in New Hampshire, drove around looking at leaves, and talking about what Feld Technologies could become now that the summer of 1987, which was full of missteps, was over. We did a huge reset that weekend on what we were doing, which set Feld Technologies on a path where it was profitable every month for the rest of its life. The other path could have been the death of the company, so it remains a potent and formative moment for me.
Happy birthday to you both!
Amy and I have coffee for about 30 minutes every morning. It’s been one of the wonderful positive side effects of the Covid crisis.
Some days we land on a topic. Other days we don’t. Today, after a few minutes, the question “What is your worldview?” popped up, and we bashed that around for a little while.
The last year has had an enormous impact on my personal worldview. My underlying value system and beliefs haven’t changed, but I’ve reconsidered, rethought, adjusted, and modified many external perspectives. But that’s the easy stuff.
Amy said something this morning that caused me to jump out of my skin with delight.
“You have always been the weird kid in the corner with a big book.”
At the moment she said this, we were discussing how we understood others and how others understood or misunderstood us.
My internal perspective is unchanged, but in the last year, it has surfaced much more clearly. About four years ago, Jerry Colonna and I had a conversation described in his book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up where I said, “I’m no longer striving.”
I didn’t completely understand what I meant by this back then, but it was the beginning of me bending the arc on my internal worldview. Jerry linked it to equanimity, which has deep roots in Buddhist thought in addition to its traditional definition.
In Buddhism, equanimity (Pali: upekkhā; Sanskrit: upekṣā) is one of the four sublime attitudes and is considered: Neither a thought nor an emotion, it is rather the steady conscious realization of reality’s transience. It is the ground for wisdom and freedom and the protector of compassion and love.
I’ve anchored on the phrase the steady conscious realization of reality’s transience which speaks to me and feels reflective of my current internal worldview.
A few minutes ago, Amy sent me this to ponder as we head into the weekend after an intense week.
Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
– Albert Camus
Notebooks, 1951-1959
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Nietzsche lately. I expect I’ll be adding some Camus to my diet.
After 89 years on this planet, Len Fassler passed away on Friday.
Len was my Yoda. As a paternal figure, he was a close second to my father. I loved him deeply. And I will miss him every day.
We were introduced in the spring of 1993 by Jim Galvin, CEO of Allcom, which had just been acquired by Len’s company Sage Alerting Systems. Feld Technologies worked with Allcom whenever we needed a network installed for a client. At the time, the state-of-the-art was a wired 10BaseT ethernet network, so Allcom did the wiring, and we did everything else. After Jim’s company was acquired, Len asked him who else he should talk to in the Boston area. Jim introduced us, and that led to lunch near our office in downtown Boston.
Soon after, Len called me and asked if I’d be interested in selling Feld Technologies to Sage Alerting. It took a while for me and my partner Dave Jilk to decide to do it, but we closed the sale in November 1993.
Len and I ended up working together on many things over the past 27 years. I still have the Brooks Brothers striped shirt that Len and his partner Jerry Poch gave me when we signed the documents for Feld Technologies to be bought by Sage Alerting Systems (which changed its name to Sage Technologies and then changed it to AmeriData). When I started making angel investments in 1994, Len invested alongside me in many companies, including NetGenesis, Harmonix, and Oblong. We then co-founded Sage Networks (which changed its name to Interliant) with Raj Bhargava (NetGenesis co-founder) and Steve Maggs (whose company was also acquired by AmeriData.) At Mobius, we invested in Vytek, another company Len co-founded. As an angel, I personally invested in CoreBTS, the company Len co-founded after Vytek was acquired.
There’s an enormous amount of my business history packed in that paragraph. Rather than go through a bunch of things we did together, I want to list some memories that will stay with me until the end of my life.
Len loved to smoke a cigar. I’d never smoked, but for several years, while we were co-chairs of Interliant together, we had a tradition of going for a long walk at the end of the day when we were together. We both smoked a cigar during this walk and talked about whatever had happened during the day and anything unresolved. Len’s cigars were omnipresent – I still remember his Lexus’s smell, which was pleasant because the cigars smelled like Len.
Going for a walk was a foundation of our relationship. Whenever we were in the same office, I knew we had something to figure out if Len came by my desk and said, “Brad, let’s go for a walk.” When we weren’t together, the phone call was the equivalent of a metaphorical walk. He had a remarkable talent for bringing up issues directly yet clearly, and working through them quickly.
Everything I learned about buying a company, selling a company, or doing a deal came from Len. If you’ve ever worked with me in any deal capacity, I’m channeling Len. I learned how to be a board member from Len. I learned how to complete a negotiation, walk away from the table, be empathetic, and be available. He also taught me how to move on when something didn’t work out or go my way.
From 1996 to 2001, I spent a lot of time with Len in New York, where Interliant was headquartered. I stayed in an apartment near Lincoln Center that I shared with the CEO of another company Len was on the board of, or at Len’s house in Harrison, NY. I felt safe in that house, loved by Len and his wife, Bunny, tucked in and comfortable in the upstairs bedroom, and part of their family at the breakfast table in the kitchen. I’m pretty sure I could find my way without Google Maps from the Interliant office in Purchase to Len’s house as well as from Dewey Ballantine’s office in NYC to Len’s house. That house was full of love.
The photo above is from the day before Fitbit went public in June 2015. I had breakfast with Len at the Gramercy Park Hotel, where I was staying. I told him I had the morning off and asked him what he wanted to do. He said he’d never been in Gramercy Park since it was a private park, so we got the key to the park from the concierge and walked around it and talked for an hour. We then wandered around the Baruch College buildings talking some more. We ended that morning with a big hug like we started and ended all of our days together.
I remember clearly a phone call on 12/1/2000 where Len called me from NYC. He told me that Cable & Wireless wasn’t moving forward with the acquisition of Interliant – the deal was all but done. Rather than approving the deal, the C&W board decided to stop all M&A activity given they just found out they would have their first quarterly loss in many years. That night, Len joined about 50 friends at the Greenbriar Inn in Boulder for my surprise 35th birthday party, which Amy had arranged. He had a remarkable ability to take every setback in stride.
I remember his signature. I saw it for the first time on the back of a manila envelope where he jotted down the terms we had just agreed to for Sage Alerting Systems to acquire Feld Technologies. Under the terms, he signed his name. I remember signing document after document with him at Interliant and remember sitting at the Interliant office in Purchase after the IPO roadshow, waiting for the SEC to clear our filing so we could price. We were waiting for one document, after which we’d sign one more thing, and the bankers would price the offering, and we’d go public the next morning. When the fax machine printed ten pages (instead of two) that were additional comments on our SEC filing (that same one that Merrill Lynch had said three weeks earlier “we are good to go on the roadshow – the SEC always clears this on time”), we knew we weren’t pricing that night. Our order book collapsed two days later. We went public two months later, but there was a lot of Scotch drunk the night we got that fax from the SEC. I didn’t get to see Len’s signature next to mine that night.
I loved the way Len put his arm around me. I loved the hug he always gave me. I loved his relationship with his son David, who also became a good friend. I loved how we said “I love you” when we said goodbye in person or on the phone.
Len changed my life. He gave me my second favorite quote, “They Can’t Kill You And They Can’t Eat You” (my dad gave me my first favorite quote, “If You Aren’t Standing On The Edge You Are Taking Up Too Much Space“)
My parents were good friends with Len. Every time I was together with all of them, I was exceedingly happy.
My long publishing relationship with Wiley began with a breakfast meeting that Len arranged with Matthew Kissner, who was a Wiley board member.
If you’ve ever heard me say, “Would you buy it for a dollar?” I learned that from Len. His influence on me formed the basis of my business philosophy, now called #GiveFirst. He was one of the first lawyer-turned-entrepreneurs I worked with, which helped me appreciate the importance of law in business and the importance of business judgment in the law.
The ultimate brilliance of Len was his ability to build deep emotional and enduring relationships. The number of people he influenced and who loved him is extraordinary.
The last time Len and I talked live was in October when he called me to say goodbye. Since then, his daughter Ellen has been my conduit to him, via emails that I’d been sending a few times each week. Ellen read them to Len and then sent me back a note with his response. Ellen, thank you.
On Friday morning, when I heard that Len passed, I immediately reached out to Frank Alfano, Jenny Lawton, Bruce Klein, Steve Maggs, Jerry Poch, Raj Bhargava, and Jerry Lebow. Some of them I talk to regularly. Others, like Bruce, I haven’t talked to in a while. But when Bruce and I got on the phone to talk about Len, it was like we were together the day before, working on something at Dewey Ballantine’s office, with Len at the other end of a long conference room table working on something else at the same time.
Len – I love you. I will miss you and think about you every day. Thank you for the sensational gift you gave me of your friendship. When it’s safe to travel to New York again, know that Frank, Bruce, Jenny, and I will be having dinner at Cellini’s together with a place set for you.
For the past nine months, Amy and I have started our morning together. I get up, pee, weigh myself, brush my teeth, meditate for 20 to 30 minutes, and then we have “morning coffee” together.
Morning coffee lasts for two cups of coffee (one regular, one decaf). This ends up being between 15 and 30 minutes, depending on what we are talking about. After spending the vast majority of our 30 years together on the road until a few years ago, this has been an incredible joy for me. Regardless of the previous day, it gives me a clear way to Simply Being Again, each morning with my beloved.
When I woke up Monday morning, I didn’t expect so much of our morning coffee this week to discuss what was going on in politics in the United States. Today, one of the things we riffed on was our respective first political memories.
Mine was Richard Nixon being impeached. I was seven years old. We didn’t watch very much television in my house growing up – mostly PBS (Channel 13 in Dallas) and sports my dad liked to watch (mostly Dallas Cowboys football.) I remember a few TV shows like Happy Days and Gilligan’s Island, but Daniel and I were only allowed one hour of TV a day, and I often didn’t use mine because I preferred to read.
I never watched the news as a kid. Maybe my parents did in their bedroom, but it took an extraordinary event for us to watch TV news together. I remember the Iran Hostage Crisis, Oliver North, and one of the moon landings (I don’t remember which one.)
We had two TVs in the house – one in my parent’s bedroom and one in the room we called “the family room.” I remember sitting on the floor in my parent’s bedroom, watching Congress impeach Nixon. I only have one visual image of it, so my guess is there was only one day that we watched it. But whatever it was, it was a climactic moment that cemented itself in my memory.
Amy remembers it also. Her family didn’t have a TV growing up, so she remembers going to the Anchor River Inn, owned by Bob and Julie Clutts, and watching the TV at the bar. I bet that we were watching TV simultaneously, me in Dallas, Texas, and Amy in Anchor Point, Alaska.
We are each lifetime members of Generation X. The broad brush of Gen X being cynical and disaffected is probably true, unless you choose purpose, meaning, joy, and empathy.
Our earliest experience with politics is of the deep cracks in the foundations of the institutions our parents could believe in. At 55, I am experiencing that again. It’s been continual low-level noise my entire life, but the volume was just turned up to 11. Or maybe even 12.
