I co-authored a fun Antler Insights essay “What is The Future of Venture?“, with Antler Ronald Jan Schuurs.

I wrote a short article for Antler Insights, the early-stage venture firm that I joined in July. You can see the post on Antler’s blog “Insights” here, and copied below. Will 2023 be the best vintage of the coming decade? Kevin Brennan, Antler—November 2022 2022 has been a year of dramatic and unprecedented scenes. Now that we are half-way through Q4 and the outlook is still unsettled, will the tension and drama continue, or will the array of challenges start easing? Signs are not looking good. The timing and duration of a well-forecast recession are still difficult to call, we are in a historic IPO drought, an ugly war of attrition wages on in Ukraine, and regular natural resources calamities…

This post is an assignment from the Writing course I took during my Q4 2021 sabbatical. While I discovered Lovelock years and years ago, it was only in 2019 in preparing to read at the wedding of my great friend Pierre in Brittany that I got to know Carl Sagan. It was funny to learn that they were office mates at NASA…

Early November 2021, during the surf segment of a sabbatical, I sat in a chi-chi cafe on my own in in the sun in Guayaquil in Ecuador. Guayaquil is a coastal city, the gateway to the Galapagos Islands, and Ecuador’s economic center. It felt odd being back surrounded by concrete, I was just off the short flight from San Cristobal. And moments from the week in the water kept coming into my head. It had been a week of surfing that I’ll never ever forget. And on the back of a boarding pass, I started trying to write out a guess as to how many thousands of hours I’ve spent surfing, the sum of all the hours that sit behind…

A little more about my background in life, below…international, sustainability-ist, surfer and athlete, in love with San Francisco and city culture, still single…

In July 2021, I was lucky enough to be invited into a place on a Grand Canyon River Expedition, within the Warren Pickett Adventure Travel Award. In the finest traditions of this Award, I wrote a Trip Report for Roger Pickett and Epsom College. In the opening pages, I share

This is the one question that I get more than any other. And fair enough. The question is a curious and natural question to be asked by friends and family who care. An absolutely well-meaning question 🙂 When the question recently came up, this image popped into my head. A splay of four playing cards fanned out in my right hand.

A big old brown sofa and a best buddy and a fire and a buttery Irish whiskey. All holed up in a cabin sixteen hundred feet high above the Central Californian coastline. You feel this quiet – and lightly guilty – privilege to be able to spend a weekend on Hollister Ranch with its uncrowded waves off eight miles of

My Aunt Marian wrote the other week, and a sentence captivated me.

Marian’s mood was full of optimism. And so I was relieved. Marian and Mum were close, so that mattered.

This one sentence I read twice, because it painted an elaborate picture in my head.

“Going to sit under the night sky for a few moments now before bed. Stars are out and it’s dry.” My mind was flown from a computer under my fingers in San Francisco to a patio in Dingle, Co. Kerry in Ireland.

5 February 2021. I was chatting to Keara. We feel confused, sad and a little isolated in a sense, with the deteriorating news of Nana’s condition over in Donegal in Ireland. It’s not just the distance of isolation, which we’re used to overcoming. It’s the era we’re in today. Not being able to join Dad and his brothers and sisters – our big, very big family reunited en masse – not happening thanks to a virus from a bat in a corner of China. Life is odd all over again, in a different way to our last Donegal days together in Mum’s fading days in October 2019. If God was a software programmer, I’m quite certain that one of the…

Do you remember those early days of lockdown? The feeling that everything had changed. The edge of emergency. Not knowing what you could touch or how often it can be practical to wash your hands. Uncertainty, confinement. The worry of ending up on a ventilator — and what that would feel like, if you were unlucky. Did you observe, too, how much you missed the energy that comes from the little shifts and changes and transitions that we rush would through, back in “everyday life.” Moving from home to the bus stop, or the short bike commute to work. The small refreshing gaps we’d take for granted, usually feeling pressed for time. Or, just heading outside for coffee with a…

“What do you think is different about the two families?”, my best friend asked the table. We were at a ‘wash-up’ dinner, the day after a wedding back in 2019, all stewing in hangover. The bride’s Dad was on my right, the bride floating around the room out of earshot. Like mine, the family was Irish and the first generation out of Ireland from two huge families. On the surface, the question was provoked by how the ‘vibe’ of two families felt different at a party. Both of similar middle-class means. But one family was open and flowing in the spirit of the night, regularly at the bar buying each other drinks. The other, not so. And my friend was…

I stood in the doorway of a sepia-tinted kitchen, dwarfed in the door frame’s height and leaning against its right hand side. I picture sunlight, but not clearly; it was just that it was a naturally well-lit room. I picture a vinyl floor covering. I see a toaster. And, I felt small. And I looked into the kitchen with the room opening to my left hand side. I think Mum was standing there. And in a classically round goldfish bowl on a table in the center of the room was my goldfish. But dead. Floating-dead dead. An orange dead goldfish is my earliest memory, framed in our kitchen in a house in Ottawa. The second Ottawa home that I lived…

This article was my “Thank You” write-up from the 2016 TeamCindy fundraisAlcatraz following that year’s Brain Aneurysm Foundation Research Symposium We are targeting a $50,000 fundraise for the Brain Aneurysm Foundation and its critical, under-funded work dedicated to providing critical awareness, education, support, and research funding to reduce the incidence of brain aneurysms. It’s personally important for me to share how my friends and family contributing supporting know where their money goes, and so I hope you enjoy this write-up of our 2016 grant. And you can learn a little more about this issue along the way… Brain Aneurysm Basics That Can Save Your Life Brain Aneurysm Statistics and Facts The  2016 Brain Aneurysm Foundation Annual Research Symposium included my presentation of the Team…

The 2016 campaign lit a new fire of new momentum for Team Cindy Alcatraz. 7 athletes, $27,000, and a very proud day for us all. A heartfelt THANK YOU to you all that supported in one way or another, donations, and the many now-repeated-gifts, the words, deeds and spirit! I had to capture it all for you, and

June 17 2016 · San Francisco, CA · First posted on Facebook. Friday thoughts. On the news of the death of a friend of old. Saturday 6 April 2002 was my last full game of rugby, and proved to be the start of two days riddled with bitter-sweet snapshot memories. It was a stunning day, as we arrived into