Travelogue San Francisco

Category : Travel
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I was in San Francisco last week representing Entrustet at Digital Death Day 2010 and then stayed for a few more days for some more meetings and to check out the city.  I’ve been to San Fran a few times in the past, but hadn’t been able to spend much time exploring the city.

I really enjoyed exploring San Francisco and made it over to Oakland for an afternoon, too.  One of my favorite parts of traveling is experiencing the food a city has to offer and San Francisco and Oakland did not disappoint.  Since most of this post is about food, you might be tempted to think that all I did was eat, but I did get out and explore too.

I started out at Digital Death Day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.  The computer history museum was interesting, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to go there unless you’re a really big computer history buff.  After the conference, we went to Amarin, a Thai restaurant right near the Caltrain station, which featured all sorts of interesting Thai food.  A bunch of us shared 8 dishes, all of which were awesome.  Speaking of Thai, I checked out Chabaa Thai for lunch the next day and hand the Panang Curry, which was a coconut milk curry that had a good mix of sweet and spice.

I walked around San Francisco, checking out the Embarcadero and wandered over toward Chinatown between meetings, climbing up some really steep hills.  I stopped into Capital Restaurant in Chinatown and got the Chinese Broccoli and a clay pot seafood dish that were both really good.  San Francisco’s Chinatown is mostly a tourist trap and not all that interesting, so make sure you check Yelp for ratings.

The next day, I had a mostly free day, so I went over to Oakland to check out the A’s and Giants in an interleague matchup.  For as crappy as people claim the Oakland Colliseium is, I really enjoyed the game.  It really reminded me of County Stadium (in a good way).  After the game, I took BART over to Oakland’s Chinatown and walked around.  If you’re interested in good food and a unique experience, skip San Francisco’s Chinatown and take BART a couple of stops over into Oakland.  It’s much bigger, less touristy and less expensive.

My next day, I explored Ocean Beach, a park along the rocky Pacific coast, and walked all along the coast, past the Golden Gate Bridge, through the Marina and stopped at two restaurants along the way.  In my winding route of about 10 miles, I saw some breathtaking scenery and learned about the shipping history of the Golden Gate.  If you’re not into walking as much as I am, check out Land’s End Trail for a 3 mile walk along the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean and later the Golden Gate Bridge.

At the start of the walk, I stopped at a small Chinese restaurant for Dim Sum to try a bunch of different dishes.  Later, I stopped into Pacific Catch for some awesome Ahi Tacos, which were seared to perfection and had the right balance of lime and spice.

The next afternoon before my flight, I walked up to Alta Mira, which is a park way up in the hills that has awesome views of the bay on one side and San Francisco on the others.  I did some work, then went to Fresca, a Peruvian restaurant in Filmore and tried two seafood heavy cream-based stews, Chupe and Picante de Mariscos.  Both had incredibly rich flavors and were full of calamari, fish, clams, shrimp, mussels and squid and featured Andean corn.  The Picante de Mariscos was a great mix of spice and cream to go with all of the seafood.

Overall, I really enjoyed exploring San Francisco, especially the food.  While Madison has a great food scene for a city it’s size, I love going to larger cities that have amazing diversity of food.  I think that the best way to get to know a city is to walk around as much as possible and try small, locally owned restaurants.  I had a great time and really enjoyed my stay.  I’m looking forward to going back soon!

Why I Won’t (might not) Vote For Russ Feingold in November

Category : Political Science & Economics
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Update 1: May 2010: Shortly after I wrote this post, I got a follow up email from a member of Sen. Feingold’s staff with the correct email response.  The next day, I got a phone call from a different member of the staff apologizing and asking if they could do anything else to help me and yesterday, I received an snail mail copy of the email response with Sen. Feingold’s signature.  This morning, I got an update from one of his staffers about new changes to the Banking Bill that seem to help change the original problems.  While it did take a negative blog post to get the correct response, I am impressed that Feingold’s staff has been this diligent about my blog post.  I changed the title to add “(might not)” because I don’t think it’s fair that when people Google “vote Russ Feingold” my post comes up 5th.

Update 2: October 2016: After six years of Sen. Ron Johnson and Russ Feingold’s seeming rejuvenation, I’m supporting Russ for Senate in 2016. We need a Senator who will bring a different perspective than the vast majority of senators and isn’t afraid to stand up for things he believes in. We need the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act back in government.

—

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the new banking bill would screw up angel investing in the US.  The bill plans to raise accredited investor levels by over 2x and institutes new regulation on angel investment.  It treats angels like hedge funds, which is wrong.  In the comments, someone asked how we could fight the bill.  I answered that I didn’t really know, but would email both of my Senators, Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl.

I sent them both a shortened version of my blog post with a little background about me through their official Washington senate emails.  I have yet to hear back from Senator Kohl, which is what I expected.  Aside from making sure that the Milwaukee Bucks stay in Milwaukee and donating $25m to get his name on the Kohl Center, Kohl really hasn’t done anything for as long as I can remember.

I figured that I would get a response from Senator Feingold, since generally more involved and he’s up for re-election in November and some are predicting it will be a close race.  He (or more likely someone from his staff) emailed me back today, 3 full weeks later, which isn’t too bad.  I assume he gets hundreds, if not thousands of emails every day.

So here’s why I won’t vote for Feingold in November.  I wrote to him about the angel investment changes in the tax bill, but here’s what I got back (emphasis added):

Dear Mr. Lustig,

Thank you for contacting me regarding your support for having private student loans be regulated by a consumer financial protection agency. I appreciate hearing from you, and strongly agree with you.  In fact, I am a cosponsor of an amendment to the financial regulatory bill which would extend consumer financial protection agency regulations to student loans.

Access to high quality public education should be available to all children, and access to higher education should be based on a student’s desire to gain knowledge and skills, not financial resources. As I travel throughout Wisconsin, I hear from many individuals who cannot attend college or other post secondary training programs without financial aid. I also hear from students who are extremely concerned about their growing debt as they try to finance their education. I support efforts to make education beyond high school available and affordable to qualified individuals who wish to pursue it.

Thank you again for contacting me. For more information about my work on behalf of Wisconsin, you can subscribe to my monthly e-newsletter by visiting http://feingold.senate.gov/newsletter.cfm. I look forward to hearing from you in the future.

Feingold (or his staff) couldn’t be bothered to actually respond to my email.  I took the time to write him an email, the least he could do is make sure he wrote me back about the issue I wrote about!  I understand it is most likely a mistake, but it’s a mistake that shouldn’t happen.  It shows that he (or his staff) don’t really care about the people who write him emails.  I know I’m not the only person who’s had a similar experience, as I’ve talked to two other people who have written to Feingold and never gotten any response.  To be honest, I’d have rather not gotten any response than the one above.

Entrepreneur 101 Additions

Category : Entrepreneurship
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I wrote my Entrepreneur 101 post back in February and added Entrepreneur 101 as a stand alone page around the same time.  I wanted to create a page where I could share all of the little things, services and time savers that I’ve learned in five years of entrepreneurship with anyone else who’s thinking about starting a business.  Entrepreneur 101 has been my most popular post and my most popular page, almost since I wrote it, so I’m happy at least someone’s reading it.  Hopefully it’s been helpful to at least one person so far.

I’ve learned a bunch more since writing Entrepreneur 101 and wanted to update the page to include some of the cool tools I’ve been using with Entrustet over the past few months.

Help A Reporter Out – HARO

I heard about HARO through Ellen Nordahl (check out her blog, it’s a good one) about 6 weeks ago and quickly signed up.  HARO is a free way for you to get PR about your area of expertise.  You sign up for the HARO emails and receive 3 per day.  Each HARO email has about 50ish requests for experts and sources from journalists who need information for stories they want to write.  I’ve seen reqeuests for sources from national publications, magazines, tv shows and other high influence publications, as well as smaller blogs looking for good stories.  If you see a request for info where you have expertise, you create a pitch in your HARO account and it gets sent to the journalist.  If the journalist thinks you’re a good fit, she will get back to you either by phone or by email.  I’ve been a member for probably about 6 weeks and have responded to 6 requests and have been mentioned in two articles, with a third one on the way.

You should subscribe to HARO just for the entertainment that comes from reading about all of the different stories that people are looking to write in the near future and from the intros to each email.  If you sign up, make sure to check out the founder Peter Shankman’s blog post about how to use HARO correctly.

HighRise – 37 Signals

37 Signals is a good company to know, even if you only read their great corporate blog.  They create really simple productivity tools that help you get things done.  We use HighRise to manage all of our contacts for Entrustet and it’s really inexpensive, about $15 per month.  You should start using a spreadsheet for your contact and task management, but once you get over about 50-75 contacts that you need to manage, check out HighRise.  37 Signals also puts out a great checklist management program as well as Basecamp, Backpack and Campfire, which are other great tools to check out.

Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction lets your users tell you what they like, don’t like and would like to see improved on your website.  It is also a community based customer service program.  For example, if someone has a question about how to use your service, they can ask it on your Get Satisfaction community and anyone of your users, or you, can answer the question to provide the answer.  I’m not using it now, but have used it with clients in the past.  At $15 per month, it is a great solution as soon as your startup or company starts to grow and gain users.

Wufoo

Wufoo makes creating forms easy and makes the forms themselves interesting and fun.  We’ve only experiemented with their free version, so I can’t comment on the paid versions, but check them out if you are creating forms.

Networking

I know I talked about networking in the original post, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to talk to others in your community.  Social media is a good starting point, but real relationships are made with face to face meetings and phone calls, not 140 character tweets or even emails.  You can use social media to augment your relationships, but there is no substitute for getting out there and talking with people.

Do you have any websites, services or tips that you think should be added to Entrepreneur 101?  Do you disagree with any of mine?  Let me know, it’s always a work in progress.

Burrill Business Plan Competition 2010 and a Look Back

Category : Entrepreneurship
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The 2010 Burrill business plan competition was held yesterday at UW.  One year ago today, Jesse and I won the students choice award for Entrustet.  Writing the plan, talking to the judges and presenting at the competition helped us launch the company.  Almost one exactly year later, we had our launch party in Madison and we’ve been featured on Mashable, The Financial Times and tons of other media.  It’s amazing what a year of hard work on a cool idea can bring!

I went to the 2010 public exhibition yesterday to check out the new companies and invite participants to join Capital Entrepreneurs.  It’s safe to say that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well on campus.  There were some really cool ideas this year, with the top prizes going to im-Bed Biosciences ($10k), Sector 67 ($7k), ProPov ($4k) and MycoLogyx LLC ($1k) with Student Spill taking home $1k and free office space in the Metro Innovation Center.  Buffalo Shoals took home the Green Credit worth $1k.

I took some pictures of some of the cool new businesses I checked out.  I only had my iPhone camera, so the picture quality does not match the business quality.  Sorry for that.

Sector 67 – Chris Meyer

Sector67 is a start up TechShop / Hacker space / Makerspace / Collaborative Environment in Madison, WI dedicated to providing members the opportunity to work on tomorrow’s technology; to build, collaborate, learn, and teach about next generation devices.  It’s basically a place for engineers and others who are trying to improve products or create new ones to use shared equipment and shared space.  Sector 67 is a non-profit and will be an awesome addition to the Madison community.  Chris is also one of the original members of Capital Entrepreneurs.

Student Spill – Heidi Allstop

SPILL is “an anonymous network of students who have formed a venting outlet for college problems that everyone seems to go through, but few people want to LISTEN to. We’re an email based support system FOR and OF college students …just to provide a place to spill your guts or console others who need to vent.”

Allstop started Spill as a student organization and has successfully helped students all over campus.  She has the potential to expand to other campuses across the country and won $1k plus free office space for a year.  Heidi is also a CE member!

ArcherVision Concepts – Raul Correa, Rahul Kamath, Alexander Jacobs, Divya Seethapathy, Sriraman Santhanvaradan

This team has a really cool product.  Many bikers use helmet mounted mirrors to see what’s behind them.  The team created a prototype that updates this system for the 21st century.  They have a camera that goes on the back of the helmet which transmits to a front mounted LCD screen.  They are in the early stages, but have a cool prototype.  Their goal is to embed the camera and the wiring into the helmet so that it will not hurt you if you crash.  Bikers love to spend money on the latest  gadget, so if done right, I could see it catching on and becoming profitable.

Flyboy Carnival – Kevin Burgess, Christopher Martinez

Flyboy Carnival is a cool tshirt company based out of the UW business incubator in the Univesity Square building.  They have some cool shirts, but my favorite part is their creative packaging.   They sell their tshirts in red and white striped popcorn boxes with their tshirts inside. Check out the picture below.

ProPOV – Jon Mumm

Jon has a really interesting backstory. Originally from Milwaukee, he got really good at the first person shooter Counter Strike.  He was so good that he was able to turn pro and earns money playing the game on the pro circuit.  I know many of you are thinking, “what? turning pro to play video games?” but there is actually a well developed professional video game circuit in the USA and an incredibly popular one in Asia.

Jon always had people asking his for tips on how to get better at the game, so he started a website called JuanSource to help teach counter strike players the tips they would need to get really good at the game.  He saved video of him playing the game and commented over the action, helping people get better.  Naturally, he charged money for the commentary and started to have a profitable online business.

His new software the he developed, ProPOV, takes in game commentary to the next level, allowing gamers to comment live over the game.  ProPOV has a nice niche that could be very profitable as it gets rolled out.

Summary

Overall, I was impressed by the quality of this year’s ideas.  You can watch all of the presentations in full on the Burrill website.  I’ve been involved in the competition as a participant or viewer since 2006, and it seems like the ideas keep getting better each year.  30% of this years entries had at least one female on the team, which I believe is a big improvement over past years.  What was even more impressive is that most of the women who entered the competition were doing so outside of fashion, which is a great improvement.  Imagine how many more cool companies there would be if women started startups at the same rate that men do?