when the saints, go marching in

a few thoughts about superbowl XLIV:

• it is a new American holiday. similar to thanksgiving 400 years ago. thank you for america, for capitalism, for sports.  my parents were hosting yesterday. my parents. sports…
• in the ESPN international broadcast they said “from Miami, FL, USA”. not often you would hear Americans state a location  in the format of city, state, country. it is a sport with great international following. still, to call the winners the world champions. doesn’t the American champions suffice?
• if you had to expand the brand how would you do it? a non US team? a longer season? NBA -  an 82-game season before a long playoff seem crazy too.
• even if you wanted the saints to win, you did not give yourself a chance to believe in it
• it is a great redemption for those seating in the stadium with bags on their faces a few years back. the saints winning a play-off game? just 2 in 42 years and i think both were in 2006
• reminds  me of the stories 40 years ago of super bowl iv and how KC won despite the vikings being heavy favorites. sean payton is a bit like hank stram

sean payton superbowl XL IV champs head coach

hank stram superbowl IV champs head coach

• no NFL season MVP has won the Superbowl.
• manning in 4th quarter was not what you expected. the quarter started colts 17 saint 16, colts with the ball and manning completing a 15 yard pass to about mid field. drive ended in missed field goal. talk about change in momentum
• wasn’t this the superbowl with the least turnovers (1) (and sacks – 1) in a long time?

answer: turnovers:

this one had 1. record is 0

Buffalo vs. N.Y. Giants, XXV
St. Louis vs. Tennessee, XXXIV

sacks – hard to find an answer

• i did believe that if the saints will score 30 or more they will win
• XLIV – some kids tell me they had to learn Roman Numerals
• seems that to be a true champion, you have to adjust your game and to control momentum. momentum does not just swing wildly. champions learn to use it
• drew brees was not good enough for SD chargers and a ‘maybe’ for Miami dolphins before the saints took a chance on him. they were 3-13 in 2005.
• let Mardi Gras begin. it never really ends

2011 crash?

what if like many earthquakes , at first there is a tremor, some damage, recovery, smiles and then the big hit.

what if the financial crises of 2008, recovery in 2009 with smiles in 2010 results in a big crises in 2011.

1755_Lisbon_earthquake

a bit morbid

but, important to analyze.

Kevin, my good friend sent this over. when kevin asks you to read something, a good portion of the time, you really want to read it. kevin is blessed with outside-of-the box thinking, contrarian point of view, blended with down-to-earth smarts, and the ability to think different and say it.

i think you should read this . (un?) likely but plausible

basically,

“Over any extended period of time, no economy can be prosperous if the government is

• overspending,
• raising tax rates,
• printing too much money,
• over-regulating, and
• restricting international trade.

It’s really as simple as that. Especially when the U.S. economy appears to have “green shoots”, it’s imperative to remember the U.S. economy cannot have prosperity given the policies of the Obama administration and Congress”

moreover,

During 2010 the economy will continue to improve, growing by more than 4%.

By the end of 2010 the unemployment rate could fall to as low as 7.0% and the Obama Administration will be busting with pride and conceit. And then 2011 will enter center stage, followed quickly by an economic catastrophe.

All the factors that will make 2010 (and have already made the last half of 2009) look so good will reverse direction, and 2011 will be a train wreck. The first effect is the so-called “slingshot” or “freefall” effect. Whenever an economy stops freefall, as the U.S. economy has, everything seems better because it’s getting worse more slowly. The slingshot effect will exert a powerful positive influence on the U.S. economy in 2010 but won’t exist in 2011.

if this is indeed the case, what should we do today?

looking for a new job?

about to commit to a new house?

consider this and may the force be with you.

i am still optimistic, but think this should be on our radar screens

when does spring start?

Spent the afternoon with Limor, her parents, and the kids

celebrated Limor’s birthday which took place this sunday (we did bazel, dizingoff, gordon, ben yehouda and back – mostly art galleries,  jewlery makers and off course, iceberg, the great ice cream store)

during our afternoon a few interesting discussions ensued. would love to hear your opinions

1. when does spring start?
2. when it rains, do you get more wet when you run, or walk?
3. if you want your tea to chill down, when do you need to add the sugar

as far as everyone is concerned we are a nice normal family…

when does spring start?

several answers came out:

• when more days, the sky is blue then grey
• when poppy flowers come out (and חרציות)
• כשהחצב פורח. wait. no, no, no
• כשהשלגיה פורחת
• pesach. or purim. but wait, it rains every purim. so pesach? it is חג האביב, ל?א.
• טו בשבת?
• march 23
• when the days start being longer, and you hear more birds

well for me, it is when the mango trees start creating their fruit. slow at first, then flowers, by august fruits. every day  a small progress.

the beauty for me is that the mango tree grow just ourside our bath window. i recommend this. plant a tree you love by your bathroom window. you will start every day with it. it is a love realtionship know one will discover.

the mangos started pushing sweet love out of their leaves this past week

welcome, spring

rain. walk or run?

running or walking during rain? when do you get more wet?

• first, lets remove the element of time. you probably get there more quickly if you run.gil claims it does not matter, and in brainiac they showed that over the same path, the runner is wetter. how?
• we decided it depends on the angle of the rain. if it is a steep angle, and you run, you cross more raindrops per second. if it is vertical, running is still wetter. got confused. help, can you? we decided it has to do with
• the proportions of speed of run vs walk
• the angle of rain/wind and
• your body x section dimensions
• alignment with wind speed

my advise:

“You get wet faster when you’re running, but you’re in it for less time.”

bottom line, do not get caught walking in the rain with you larger family, if you do not want this types of conversations. then again, maybe you do.

here is an interesting discussion favoring running.

read the answer, not the question

and another

look here as well (link is lost)

To stay drier, do you walk or run in rain? If you walk, researchers
say, you're all wet - Eric Sorensen, Seattle Times

   http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/134370003_rain23m.html

and some more interesting links.
apparently an unsolved question:
a candian physicist point of view
a mathematician's

Chill down

you want your hot tea to chill quickly

should you add the sugar first, or wait?

decided this depends on ΔT of the water and air. to the 4th degree.

so to chill down more quickly, keep the delta T high, add sugar later

still, when thinking of tea and cooling it. it think of my grandfather pundak, סבא ישעיהו , and his great ice tea

there is still the question of at which temperature it is best to drink your tea. and we have not added milk, yet…

for the Talpiot type readers, please, some help and observations

i guess i am rusty on my physics and the &# year old to 12year old threw too many ideas at me

JD Salinger and dry dates

JD Salinger, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature is gone

a few thoughts:

• i may or may not be still in my adolescence, but agree with holden that most adults are “phony”
• where do the central park lagoon ducks go during winter? they have a recluse in the park
• it is hard to walk in Central Park and not think of holden, the book and my brother, Ofer, who connected to its loneliness so fully

for trivia lovers, worth while to read on

DRY DATES

JD salinger had a broken heart. this is where some of the best art comes from

out of fracture, comes greatness.

the girl’s name?

oona o’neill daughter of of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning  playwriter  Eugene O’Neill and writer Agnes Boulton.

for those who may remember, O’neill was played by  Jack Nicholson in the movie Reds (for a review of this great film, click here)(along side the fantastic Diane Keaton). which directly makes me think of Reds’ star, co-writer, producer and director Warren Beatty about whom Carly Simon sang, ‘You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you’. more about beatty simon and their dates in a second.

oona o’neill also dated

• cartoonist Peter Arno,
• director Orson Welles,
• (and as stated above, author J. D. Salinger). To Salinger’s disappointment, however, their relationship ended when she met
• Charlie Chaplin and later become Lady Chaplin, (therefore Salinger’s broken heart).

arno who perhaps is least known today was multi-talented, rich, and handsome.  He exuberated confidence. his sketches were funny, satirical, unique and risky. like the one above.

anyhow, seems that oona had something about her

Beatty

Beatty has had several high-profile relationships with his costars, including Natalie Wood (Splendor in the Grass), Julie Christie (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait), Diane Keaton (Reds), Isabelle Adjani (Ishtar‘) and Madonna (Dick Tracy).

not bad

back to carly simon

who i think is totally wonderful

is also well known for “Anticipation“, which was used as the soundtrack for TC commercials  for Heinz ketchup in the 1970s. The song relates Simon’s state of mind as she waits to go on a date with Cat Stevens. After their brief liaison during 1970-1971 ended amicably, Stevens wrote his song “Sweet Scarlet” about Simon, who also had highly publicized relationships with Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Kris Kristofferson, and James Taylor during this period.

Oona dated cartoonist Peter Arno, director Orson Welles, and author J. D. Salinger.^{[citation needed]} To Salinger’s disappointment, however, their relationship ended when she met Charlie Chaplin

behind the shadows

this post is written in response to guy grimland’s article in the marker on VC responses to emails with an investment proposition

i would like to share with you my perspective:

• what i thought
• what i did
• and why

first the facts:

here is the email i got:

From: shadowscale shadowscale [mailto:shadowscale.startup@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 4:43 PM
To: Adi Pundak-Mintz
Subject: Meeting with Gemni

Dear Adi

My name is Yinon Tzuk. I’m the co-founding CEO of Shadowscale, a startup focused on automatic optimization and scaling for enterprise and consumer web applications.
Our founding team is an organic team that left Checkpoint 2 years ago, after spending 3 years together building scaling, cloud based security products.

Since then we’ve spent the last 2 years developing a unique solution for enterprise/consumer web applications experiencing rapid growth.
These applications often suffer from accelerating infrastructure and operational costs, coupled with significant learning curves resulting in downtime, poor user experience, and revenue loss.

With our service customers can continue developing their applications on a SINGLE virtual web server and a SINGLE database, with simple real time data manipulation.
Instead of worrying about load balancing, caching, security, CDNs, code acceleration, backup and deployments – Shadowscale does the heavy lifting in the background.

The customer controls the application’s SLA, availability, security and speed/cost ratios via a dashboard and can implement any state of the art scaling module on demand.
With the ability to see performance data, bottlenecks and solutions customers can make meaningful choices about their infrastructure cost decisions and optimization without any actual learning curves, development and operational costs.

During October 2009 we deployed the first version of Shadowscale supporting automatic scaling for databases with a top tier US based enterprise beta partner, with excellent results – more deployments are planned to follow during Q1 2010.

I’d love to set up a meeting to tell you more about Shadowscale in person.

Regards,
Yinon Tzuk

here is my response

yinon

thanks for your nice note

someone from the team will be in touch by phone to get more details and see if there is room for a meeting

sounds like you are at an exciting phase, and congrats on the great work up till now

do you have a presentation

take a look at the link below to my VC related blog posts

looking forward

adi

blog http://adisababa.wordpress.com/category/vc

here is gemini’s response once guy called to ask for comments after disclosing ‘the hoax’ (more of which are to come)? and complaining that only one partner responded

Dear guy

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me while you are with your son

Here is gemini’s team response:

We try to reply to every opportunity within 48 hours

We try to research and discuss the opportunity as a group and call the entrepreneur or set a meeting within a week most of the time, and some times 2 weeks

It is our belief that in order to have a clear and synchronized process it is best that only the partner and associate from the relevant sector will lead the interaction with the entrepreneur. Therefore multiple responses are not productive. We believe this is a professional method for dealing with opportunities that come thru email our desire for professional conduct is borne from respect to the entrepreneur and a view of ‘treat others as you would be willing to be treated’

The success of israeli high tech, is lead by entrepreneurs, not VCs, and we try to remember this every day

i will try to add some thoughts:

this letter looked unusual, (there is no Yinon Tzuk on linked in), Gemini is misspelled, the email address, some essential material was missing, and this is not the right way to approach a VC. i still believe that people deserve a response. i am not even good enough on this topic most of the time. this includes my wife, my friends, CEOs of my companies. so i have a long way to go to improve

guy from my experience is

• intelligent
• motivated
• thinks out side of the box

i think this article is sad.

if you take one thing away from this episode it should be this

do not approach VCs via email

take the time to talk with people, find people who know the VCs and believe in you and in your idea and will introduce you and guide you through the first meeting and hopefully start a process. you can read more about my thoughts how to approach a VC, here.

you will get far more from the interaction (which, at times, is not enough)

i think this article is sad. why?

becuase we as a high tech industry and the VCs financing early stage entrepreneurship have far greater problems which should be addressed in depth and not through a yellow prism

for israeli VC s these may include:

• lack of belief in the vc model
• lack of belief in their ability to help
• lack of desire to work really hard. and boy, to be a good VC you need to either be really lucky or work really hard

most of these issues could be cleaned up by a more equitable and reasonable compensation structures.

for isreali entrepreneurs the issues to discuss may include:

• build a reasonable plan and execute against it
• optimize long term, not short term. (can VCs help here? are they part of the problem?)
• build a team and keep it together

but, don’t forget to wear sunscreen

first to market? Stigler’s law of eponymy!

One of the greatest takeways from my semester at Yale was that no matter how original you think you are, or an idea you have, someone has thought of it before, and has a little academic activity established around that thought already.

some, hundreds of years ago.

so, a bit of humility

Stigler’s law of eponymy is a process proposed by University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in his 1980 publication “Stigler’s law of eponymy”.  In its simplest and strongest form it says: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”

Stigler’s Law was discovered many times before Stigler named it

Historical acclaim and reputation tend to be allocated to people unevenly. Scientific observations and results are often associated with people who have high visibility and social status, and are named long after their discovery. Eponymy is a striking example of this phenomenon. Particularly important scientific observations are often associated with a person, as in the case of Gaussian distribution, Halley’s comet, and Planck’s constant. Nature never works in isolation. Ideas arrive in parallel, and theoretical or practical works/experiments too are near simultaneous in time-space. It is the publicizing and recording of the work that assumes identity relationship with the one most famously connected with it. Indeed many ideas never see fruition for their time has not come or they are not fully recognised, appreciated or properly advertised.

Often the person who is associated with the particular observation, theory, or result was not its original inventor. Based on his studies on the history of statistics, Stephen Stigler therefore proposed his own “Stigler’s Law of Eponymy.” Stigler attributes the discovery of Stigler’s Law to sociologist  Robert K. Merton (which makes the law self-referencing).

merton, by the way. was a distinguished American sociologist perhaps best known for having coined the phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy.” He also coined many other phrases that have gone into everyday use, such as “role model” and “unintended consequences“. his son, robert merton is a noble prize winner in economics. he is the one of black scholes fame and long term capital management LTCM.

press here for a good article about how great ideas are not rare

who usually gets the credit? the most popular or powerful person at the time at which it gained wide acceptance.

the lesson here is:

• there is already a principle named after a person for this. the  matthew principle, (more will be given to those that already have, matthew 25:29)
• for israeli startups,  to invest in marketing

and time markets,

and get lucky.

4 minutes

i you have not seen the movie ‘vier minuten’, you should consider it.

here is a clip

one of my takeaways:

out of fracture comes greatness

all you need is love

some nice thoughts for the weekend:

what does love look like?

try this

what does it sound like?

nice job, red and starbucks.

founders, beware

every once in a while you read an article or a book that changes the way you think.

almost like falling in love, you think of it several times a day.

a month later you are a changed person.

please read this blog post. it was published 8 weeks ago, and its comments are very interesting as well. it claims that israeli startups fail because they do not understand and do not invest enough in marketing.

steve duplessie, from my experience is:

• smart
• a thought leader
• like many great people, not full of himself

a great book on a related matter is 4 steps to the epiphany, by steve blank, founder of… E.piphany, once a big company.

here is an abstract, from chapter 2 of the book

my comment to founders and management, before you start spending like crazy on marketing:

• try to create some measurements. cost per lead is a great start
• you will not win ‘the game’ if you do not build the best customer acquisition engine in the industry. no matter how good your product is
• engage with customers. listen. challenge your assumptions. engage with customers some more
• build a portfolio of marketing activities and test which ones work. start this early and slowly
• when you spend big, which you should, ask yourself: ‘am i  in good position to know what i am getting for this?’

since you are by now doing something repeatable and scaleable, it is less entrepreneurial.

so founders, beware.

mission of hope, a story of life and death

i am proud of the israeli hospital in haiti

our humanitarian efforts in Haiti are remarkable because

Jean Michel Gubilande holds her son at the IDF hospital in Port-au-Prince on Saturday. He was born there, a month early but healthy, and she has named him Israel.

• we live half a world away
• our efforts are done full-heartedly
• the results are meaningful
• the response was quick
• at the time, the American medical efforts in Haiti are still in planning phases and not operational
• for once, our disproportionate response is positive
• and, it is still difficult to find stories of how israel is to be blamed for the earthquake

makes you wonder, when will we help the people 80 km south of here?

for some remarkable stories, perhaps the best i have seen related to israel in a long time:

interview with a brother of a man rescued after 4 days.

even sky news has something nice to say about this.

abc doctor trying to help a pregnant woman and another miracle of birth

and a short, but telling CNN piece, really worth watching: