Everyday

Everyday I tend to lose myself in a thought, if only for moment. Sometimes I take a minute or two to tune out and think about something that interests me. An entirely selfish moment.

When you are traveling, every second of every day feels like that. The thrill of the non-routine;, new things and new adventures.

Daily routines seem to include sufficient change and excitement to occupy my full attention, but routines each day include some kind of hard work.

Weng weng

i love you weng weng

Cory breakin it down

A clip of Cory breakin' it down for all of his fans on his 30th birthday...

click the pink play button in the lower left corner

Monogram Lake in North Cascades National Park

Some pictures on ZoomIn of our recent backpacking trip to Monogram Lake in North Cascades National Park. The hike starts with about 6200 feet of straight-up switchbacks, making me almost regret lugging a bottle of wine. But we got a nice pay-off with the views...

Pre-launch build-up

Zoomin.com is the 5th new business I've been a part of (3 of my own smaller companies, and Half.com), and one dynamic has remained consistent throughout: the Roller Coaster.

The Roller Coaster, described very well here by Marc Andreesen, is the grind of emotional highs and lows that you experience on a day-to-day basis in a startup. Some days you feel as though your company is destined for greatness or riches or both, and other days the anxieties about cash flow, competitors, and timelines make you feel like you're holding a 1st-Class ticket to nowhere. Zoomin.com is no different, to be honest, but when you have a solid team and a clear goal, the good days out-number the bad days.

Right now, we're close to Launch, and we're sweating the small stuff. My own mental ball of yarn is wound a little tighter, and finding a reasonable stopping point each day (work/life balance, of course) is getting more and more difficult. The stress and anxiety are finding me on the pillow, in the shower, and on my dinner plate. My wife is taking some R&R time right now, and I am not in the frame of mind to join her, even when I do step away from the laptop.

But it's a thrill.

I can't wait to see how we're received by my knowledgeable colleagues, the blogosphere of influencers and early adopters, fellow execs of other startups, the media, and most importantly, our customers. I can anticipate many of our early challenges, but nothing is as momentous as your launch day, and I'm eager to get there. Hope the anxiety levels let me get there in one piece.

Like my friend Josh Kopelman says, "you only launch once.".

Missus Wins Huge Modern-Looking Glass Award

My missus won the Most Outstanding Student Award for her LLM program. She is awesome! Hyperachiever extraordinaire.

The award itself is neat-looking with girth to spare. After receiving said award, the missus snacked and chatted while I held it. She kept looking at me with concern, as if I might drop it.

As if. I was (and still am) mighty proud of my Scrappy the Law Dog.

new Fantasy baseball: RotoHog

Yeah, yeah, I know what you're probably thinking: another fantasy sports website. Big deal.

This one is different. And I plan to play it.

The site is called RotoHog.com, and they have a few improvements to fantasy sports that got my juices flowing. If it's as good as I think it will be, I might abandon ESPN and Yahoo once and for all. No joke.

First, on RotoHog you can only create one team, but you can participate in an unlimited number of leagues. So I can use the same team to play against my co-workers, my college buddies, and in my neighbor's league as well. It's a level playing field because each team starts with the same budget and you buy players for your roster just like buying stocks on the stock market. I think the market has over-priced Jeter a bit, but I picked up Verlander for what I think is a steal. If you find a good deal on a player in the open market, you can sell another player off your roster at market price to free up some budget to grab a different player. Pretty sweet.

RotoHog uses a straight-forward points-based system like most other leagues; not rotisserie or head-to-head. Every team starts with the same budget and the same opportunity to buy and sell players at prices based on supply and demand, so you can join any league any time and it's still a fair competition. The kicker: every RotoHog team is also competing with the universe of other RotoHog teams for a $100,000 grand prize and the title of Greatest Fantasy Baseball Player in the World. Apparently you can win other prizes as well, but the upcoming baseball season is their beta season so I'll have to wait and see about those.

This kind of league solves some problems I've had with online fantasy sports, in general.
1) I hate managing 4 different teams - it's a pain in the neck to keep track of all of them;
2) I hate those so-called Best Fantasy Player awards because they are bogus - just because you play in a weak league, got the #1 draft pick, made a phony trade with your brother-in-law, and predictably racked up insane points does not make you the Best, regardless of what ESPN thinks;
3) I hate the tunnel-vision that results from only watching the stats of my players and whatever scrubs are floating on the waiver wire. With this system I can evaluate the performance and corresponding price of every player and acquire them if the price is right. Now I will have an interest in the whole league, not just the players on my team.

So I like it and I think that RotoHog is worth a shot. I issue this challenge to every other roto geek and baseball beat writer out there: let's form a public league on RotoHog and see who really knows baseball.