Longest Read for the longest year

It has been a long year—the longest. I spent the lengthy days and endless nights fluctuating between nonstop working, curling up under the covers, and — mostly — writing. You might have read some of those words.

For some odd reason, I didn’t want my writing from the past year to fall into the digital ether of nothingness. I wanted to etch the journey I took into something more tangible.

Like pieces of a giant jigsaw, I remixed over one hundred blog posts. I spliced them with my photos. In the process, I have crafted what could be labeled an eBook. One could call it a zine. I just think of it as my attempt to remember fragments of a remarkable year. It is illustrated mostly by my photographs, though a few from friends have helped me tell the unusual year’s story.

Clocking in at over 20,000 words, this isn’t


A visual re-interpretation of self

As someone who lives in the grays, I immensely appreciate a cold rainy weekend in San Francisco. This morning, I made myself a nice cup of tea and sat down on the writing table with my iPad, hoping to spend time reading some articles and catching up on books that have slowly started to pile up on the bed-stand. For some odd reason, I began to look at some of my older photos. I had edited them over the past twelve months.

As I flipped through the gigantic photoshop files, it felt as if I was looking at the work of someone else. I felt assaulted by the colors — even though I had stripped out the extraneous as much as I could. It is not as if I don’t enjoy a beautiful sunset or a glorious sunrise. It is not that I don’t enjoy the pinks, mauve, and gentle


Something about Slack (+ Salesforce)

Slack logo
Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

I am sure that you have heard that Salesforce is buying Slack for a whopping $28 billion by now. And if you saw Marc Benioff in conversation with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang this morning, you could tell that Christmas came early for him and his company. With (Quip CEO) Bret Taylor and (Slack CEO) Stewart Butterfield in the ranks, it is not surprising — he has a company that can go toe-to-toe with Microsoft.

That will be the subject of a different blog post, but for now, let me talk about Slack and Stewart. I had originally crafted this piece on the day of Slack’s public offering. As an angel investor in the company, I felt compelled to write about why Slack mattered? Well, I never really published the piece. Thinking about it — it doesn’t matter: it is still relevant today, as


Why we are underestimating Zoom & it’s impact?

The cool, crisp fall weather, the smell of roasting turkey, the prospect of soft, silky pumpkin pie, and a chance to be with family are the usual harbingers of Thanksgiving in America. In pre-pandemic times, these things indicated that it was time to kick back and get into the holiday spirit. Of course, this is 2020, and nothing is like it was before.

Yesterday, when signing off from our weekly partners’ meeting, I thanked everyone for being a constant presence in my life over the past ten months, even if it was just as a rectangle on a screen — or better yet, especially so. After all, that was the closest we could responsibly get to each other as society felt its way through this pandemic-sized disaster. To the extent that we have been able to make any progress, a lot of it was thanks to Zoom. Yes, we may


Sunday Musings

Iceland 2017. Made with Fuji XPro2. Focal length: 90mm. ISO 250. f/8. 1/400th of a second.

David Churbuck, a friend and a former boss, wrote an essay on his blog, exploring American individuality and the current politicization of something as simple as wearing a mask to prevent the virus’s spread for the collective good. He points out that this isn’t the first time. Helmets, seat-belts, and now the masks are part of the “supremacy of the individual in America versus the herd,” he noted. “Americans don’t like to be told what to do by those faceless powers on high who know what’s best for them. They never have and never will.” 

That doesn’t make it right. 

As a young man, the idea of making my own choices, my own decisions, and thus the freedom to follow my spirit, is what attracted me to America. Those of us not born here know it


The Need for (Gigabit) Speed

I am one of the fortunate ones — I have enjoyed the fiber-connected life for nearly 11 years, four of which have been blessed by a gigabit/second connection. The bi-directional gigabit speed has been a blessing. That speed has come in handy during the pandemic — I am nearly always on Zoom and using the network for staying connected, entertained, and informed. This need for speed and stability has seen the demand go up. 

According to OpenVault, a market research firm, nearly 4.9% of the US households have a gigabit/second connection, versus 2.81 percent of all US households at the end of 2019. If we end 2020 with over 7 million gigabit households, it would be a pretty big deal. To give it context, China added 10.3 million fiber connections in Q2 alone. Still, I hope this encourages more small fiber networks to be spun-up to compete with the dominant


Pandemic Silence

The pandemic’s horrors are well known to most, but there have been some silver linings. The emptiness of the streets, fewer people driving, and general lack of activity gave us the gift of silence. How silent were many parts of our society?

The silence was very noticeable — I would walk out every morning and stand right next to the bay bridge and hear nothing. You can hear traffic rumbling on the bridge from my apartment on busy mornings, about half a mile away. Obviously, I wasn’t alone in this observation. According to the University of Michigan researchers who analyzed data from the Apple Hearing Study, the environmental noise exposure dropped by half. (The full study is available here.)

University of Michigan’s School of Public Health took noise exposure data from volunteer Apple Watch users in Florida, New York, California, and Texas, and analyzed more than a half-million daily noise


Pandemic will change money

The horrors of the pandemic are hard to ignore. The long-term damage to society is still unknown. What is undeniable, however, is that we are in a period of extreme, rapid change that will redefine how we interact with the world around us.

It has been said before and bears repeating: The pandemic has forced us into the future, and it has done so in a hurry. “The pandemic has compressed what might have taken 5 or 10 years, and it’s compressed it into a very, very short window,” Levi Strauss & Co. CEO Chip Bergh recently commented. McKinsey’s findings confirm as much. Selligent, a market company, surveyed 5,000 consumers in North American and Europe and found 36 percent of respondents shop online weekly versus 28 percent pre-COVID-19.

I often wonder and worry about a future where everything is digital. Change is never equitable, and especially the changes brought on


#205

September is almost over. Two hundred and five days have passed since I started isolating during this pandemic. As someone who loves traveling, it has been challenging to stay in place. Six months later, I have begun to feel comfortable with the idea of not going anywhere. 

It has allowed me to read and explore new topics — from climate change to the science of materials to the future of food. The time saved from not being in motion allowed me to connect with some smart brains rethinking our future and what we need to do to live with all the swamping changes. 

Maybe that is why I am a little less interested in the political drama around TikTok — which feels like a reality TV show at times. The wall to wall coverage of such issues is distracting us from the real problems we face as a society. While