Journeys Make Our Maps

Writing from United’s UA 930, en route once again to the hills of Donegal, Dad time and Irish wedding time, a favorite Irish cousin marrying an Englishman (local controversy). As they forecast here, ‘the craic will be mighty’! I noticed the feeling that when you make a journey regularly, it becomes part of the map of who we are. And it’s the journeys that start to make our maps. Keep…

Just Get In…

I pulled around the corner by the Cliff House, where the wide lens view of the ocean zooms into first tells of how the wave is running at the North end of Ocean Beach. Too much tide – I knew that – but tesselated swell lines running, fat and jumbling on top of each other. Still, corners of waves, the black seals of a few surfers in the water, and…

Resources For Entrepreneurs Raising Capital

A running list… 1. On Financing Seed Deals: How to Grow from Startup to Venture Capital by David Willbrand Y Combinator’s overview of the SAFE financing note (their invention) – link and see in particular the link to Safe User Guide. A Carta video series on the SAFE financing structure, including on Pre-Money versus Post-Money SAFEs. 2. On Pitching to Investors LinkedIn thread: “How can you optimize the length of…

The Automattic Creed

Every now and then, in those hours of the evening when you pull out your computer just one more time, and just spend five minutes dandering around on the internet, just going down your own rabbit holes of curiosity… Every now and then in those moments, I’ll go to the website of some person I admired from years of poking around blogs and podcasts, and scan through to some of…

Yesterday It Was New Year’s Day (…It Feels Like)

…and we were in Squamish, in Pete’s cosy apartment that stares out at a canvas of floor-to-sky granite wall rising out of the earth, and with the beautiful thick-grey-white-gray furred husky Sky ever gently pacing around. I’d be up early in the pre-dawn silent darkness, cuddling a pot of coffee at Pete’s elegant kitchen wooden kitchen table, ‘live-edge’ in its cut honoring the raw bark line on one side, and…

Schliersee, Bavaria

Landing back from Canada on the 2nd, I had a short bag change in my elegant new abode in San Francisco (thank you Simon and Catherine) before Lufthansa whisked me through the night sky to from SFO to FRA Frankfurt. And from there I followed C’s precise instructions on how to find a train that would glide me 400km south-westerly through cityscapes and landscapes of Germany down to Munich. Now…

Review of ‘The Heart’ by Maylis De Kerangal

To appreciate this book, you have to enjoy the deepest ethereal descriptions, which start from the first sentence, on Simon Limbre’s heart. Stunning writing depicting a harrowing 24 hours, dropping the readers into the thoughts and dialogue and minute-to-minute experience of a tragedy, the victim’s quick demise thereafter, before the race against the clock to extract organs, including for a heart transplant, to allow new life. From the stunning opening…

Review of ‘Letters To A Young Poet’

A wonderful short read, timely too for me, after being gifted by a great friend. Think he’d heard me bang on enough about my wrestling with writing during this 2023 career pause! The reader is pulled into the lives of a devoted young poet, who writes to Rainer Rilke in appreciation and inspiration, and gets a response and many more. The correspondence weaves us through philosophical and practical questions, with some beautiful turns of phrase in the advice.