Posts Tagged ‘backpacking’

Offsite complete, re-entry, hiatus

September 3, 2009

Well, my adventure came to a rather fitting and comfortable close on Monday August 24th, at about 10:45 in the morning, when I arrived at the Onion Valley trailhead, and met my longtime friend, Miles, who graciously spirited me away to one of his relatives’ condos at Mammoth Mountain, so I could take a well deserved, and very much needed hot shower.  We then spent the next eight or so hours catching up as we made our way back to San Francisco, where I caught a flight back home on Tuesday morning.

The trip was just spectacular.  No disappointments really, of any kind.  An enormous number of small and large pleasant surprises along the way, and a steady stream of incredibly kind and generous people I met along the trail.  I ended up doing about what I had set out to do, mileage-wise (170+ miles, 60,000+ feet of climbing and descending), but had to adjust both the beginning of the trip (started a few days later than I had planned) and the end (decided not to do the 28 miles in two days to Shepherd’s Pass, and left the trail at Kearsarge Pass instead).

I began the trip with two close friends from high school (Ernie and Duane), and was able to end the trip meeting three other close friends from high school and college (Brian, Steve, and Mark)…all of whom I’ve been backpacking with in much of this same country for many years.  And in between I had plenty of time on my own, some days not seeing a single person on the trail, and camping at some lakes where I was the only person there – and perhaps for many miles around.  But I was never lonely, or lacking for something wonderful to look at, think about, or explore.

Two people I met really made warm and lasting impressions.  The first was Patt, the 81 year-old woman who ran the Muir Trail Ranch backpacker resupply station, and whose heart was both huge and warm.  She was charmed with what my thirteen year-old, Ben, wrote on the outside of my resupply package (actually a 5 gallon plastic bucket):  “By opening this bucket, you hereby agree to buy your thirteen year-old son a kitten”.  Ben loves cats, and she and I had a nice long laugh about his wit and seemingly foolproof plan.  Ben, sorry, that contract was not binding in California.

The second was a 20 year-old Cal Poly junior, Ryan, who I crossed paths with for two days, as he was on his way to attempting the entire John Muir Trail (all 221 miles), in nine days.  Ryan has maturity and ambition beyond his years, and carried a good dose of humility as well.  He had failed to do this same adventure in June, went home, figured out what had gone wrong, and came back to do it again.  Meaningful failure in action.  He posted a comment here on my blog when he returned, letting me know he did in fact finish in nine days.

I collected a set of photos and made an online slide show of my trip (using some slick web technology from our company, Smilebox), and it should be on this side of not too long and hopefully not boring:

Click to play this Smilebox slideshow: JMT slide show
Create your own slideshow - Powered by Smilebox
Make a Smilebox slideshow

Thanks to so many of you for your encouragement and support.  I am deeply grateful I had this opportunity, and appreciated as well as valued every moment I was in the Sierras.

And as some of you may have noticed, I have changed the masthead photo, to one I took of Upper Kearsarge Lake on August 24, in the early morning.  A fitting photo, and it will be nice to have this frame my blog for the coming year.

It’s been a challenging “re-entry” process getting back up to speed on life at home and work, and I wanted this post to also let you know that I will be taking a hiatus from posting here, to focus attention on these areas.  I hope to resume again later in the fall.

Tags:,
Posted in fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Networking, Values | 7 Comments »

My John Muir Trail adventure

August 8, 2009

Many of you know I’m about to make my trek down most of the John Muir Trail, and that I will be “off the grid” from today (August 8th) and on the trail until I emerge at the Symmes Creek Trailhead (near Independence, CA) on Monday August 25th.

This is a trip I’ve been planning for the better part of a year, and has been a life-long goal of mine.

Thanks to the generosity of some dear friends from high school who I bacpack with every summer, I will be carrying with me a “FindMeSpot” GPS unit, which will transmit my location to a google map embedded in a web page, so you can track my progress along the way.

The device is setup to broadcast my location every ten minutes, so you really can follow me as I go – think of it as a back-to-nature variant of twitter.

There will also be a little footprint corresponding to where I pressed my “update” button each day, which you can click on to get the time stamp and GPS coordinates.

You can check my progress and see where I am along the way.

That said, for those of you who know me well, I might end up forgetting to make a daily update, so if you don’t see an update on any one day, don’t assume something dire has happened. This GPS device also has a button I can press to summon the rangers, so it will also serve as an emergency beacon if I need it to, but we all know I won’t.

I may be able to update my blog when I resupply on the 14th or 15th, but am not counting on it.

Look for an update for sure sometime after I complete my trip, on the 26th or 27th.

Thanks everyone for your support and enthusiasm, I have much to reflect on, especially recently, relating to the core theme of this blog – meaningful failure.

I will surely have a wonderful experience, and am deeply grateful for the opportunity to make this journey.

Posted from my iPhone, at 7,800 feet near the Red’s Meadow trailhead. Updated from ‘small un-named lake’ next to the John Muir Trail, at 9,260 feet, where for good or bad, I have 3G reception.

Tags:,
Posted in fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Values | 1 Comment »

A BDP from an unlikely “industry”

July 29, 2009

My first job out of business school was with a management consulting firm who focused on growth strategies for their clients.  The four founders of the firm were former partners at Bain, and they brought to our firm the concept of “best demonstrated practices” which we referred to by the acronym “BDP.”

Bain defines a BDP as something that “generates the most value at the least cost.”  At our firm it referred to an example something done so well you could you use it as a model to learn from, where you could discern the essence of success from and apply it more broadly.  This could be a business process or a business model, communications or management style.  It’s a nice construct to help you identify patterns that could be relevant to you or your business.

Of course BDPs also have limitations.  Without the corresponding insight about the context of why an example works so well, about all you’ll be able to do is copy the motions of the example, but not the essence of its effectiveness.   To make a BDP really work you’ve got to simultaneously abstract away the context while also deeply understanding it.

I’ve seen some of the startups I’ve worked with over the years really get this wrong, whose teams will energetically seek out the best performing companies in some discipline (say, acquiring new users) and just copy what was done, without understanding whether or not those same methods really make sense or apply to their business, with their users. 

But every so often you come across an example of simplicity and insight, efficiency of communication, where the problem has been thought through so completely you just wish you could take it, copy it, and paste it into whatever business you’re running.

I came across one of these earlier in the week.  You know from my last post that I’m hiking the John Muir Trail next week, which will take about three weeks.  I won’t be able to carry all my food for that length of time and will need to resupply twice along the way.  This works pretty simply, you mail a package of supplies to one of two “resupply” points, and they hold it for you until you arrive.  You restock your backpack, give them your trash, and off you go again.

But it’s more complicated than that.  I am depending on that food being there when I get there, If it’s not there when I get there, I’m screwed – I’ll be close to being out of food and will still have more than a week of hiking to go to the next resupply.  So getting this right matters a lot.

The first resupply point is like a hotel in the mountains, about a six mile roundtrip detour from the trail.  The second resupply point, The Muir Trail Ranch, is much more convenient, literally on the trail.  The quality of thinking that went into the instructions about how to get your package to them, and how to ensure a successful resupply, is simply magnificent.  The fact that you ship your food to them in a five gallon plastic bucket makes this all the more whimsical.

It’s not just the explanation of the steps and logistics, it’s the tone of the communication.  Clear, simple, welcoming, conveying a desire to make you successful, to make the whole process successful, conveying a deep understanding of the context of their service. 

Their instructions reads like an FAQ, but it’s not a laundry list of questions, it’s a very thoughtful and insightful delineation of your needs and their ability to meet them.  They’ve addressed the “lifecycle” of a resupply – the range of needs you will have (email access, recharging devices, disposing of your trash) when you’ve come to get more food. 

To me the high point is at the bottom of the page, where they encourage you to pre-register your delivery, and will even e-mail you pre-printed shipping labels.  The example label sheet is stunning in its efficiency – I don’t know about you, but I’ve certainly never mailed a bucket before, and doing so is not obvious.

This experience certainly reduced some anxiety about my resupply, but made me appreciate how wonderful it is to be on the receiving end of high quality thinking and customer awareness.  Where insight about the context is abundant.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Business planning, Empathy, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge | Leave a Comment »

Preparation for a long offsite

July 23, 2009

I’ll be hiking the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California next month, which is something I’ve wanted to do my entire adult life.  The Sierras and backpacking really took root with me in high school, where a core group my friends went every summer, and continued through college and a few years beyond before losing the thread to careers and starting families.

Three years ago we restarted these annual trips, and about then I realized how much I enjoy being up in the mountains, away from all forms of electronic communication, as a way to get some perspective and some balance.

So this year I leave on August 4, and my friends and I will start down the John Muir Trail, five days later they’ll leave the trail at Red’s Meadow, and I’ll resupply there and continue on, on my own.  I’ll finish near Mt. Whitney, two weeks and 170 miles later.

And I’ve been doing a lot of reading to prepare for the trip.  Mostly trail guides, even a book on the geology of the Sierras (ensuring I will be the most boring person at the next cocktail party I go to).  But one that’s proven particularly helpful is a book called High Sierra by Phil Arnot, and it’s been great at providing detail on side trips I can make along the way.

300+ pages of detailed route descriptions, elevation changes, permit locations…in short a bunch of data and information about as “touchy feely” as the phone book.  It even has a section on “Hiking Solo” with a set of very pragmatic preparation guidelines regarding safety.   But then it went in a direction I didn’t expect, with the following passage:

“So, in a way the wilderness experience may be catalytic in bringing us to face, really face, the most important questions we can ever ask ourselves:  Am I really living the life I want to live?  Am I fulfilled in my work?  Are my relationships based on sharing and intimacy or are they primarily obligatory?  What do I really want to do with my life?”

Well, for those of us who love backpacking and being in the mountains, that set of questions told me the author truly knows his subject.  For me, these are the questions my mind gets drawn to when my “job” for the day is to traverse six or eight miles (or more) of trail at 10,000 feet, and what separates you from the beginning and end of the hike is a lot of time to walk and think.

Take the “fulfilled in my work” question.  That one’s easy.  I love my job as a venture capitalist.  I love that it requires that you think hard about strategy and equally hard about operations and execution.  You’re on a constant learning curve looking at new businesses and needing to quickly get to their essence to make a funding decision.  And when you find a business you want to fund, you get to go deep with it, for years, to help it (hopefully) succeed and grow.

But that’s the “work” part of this, and what makes my job truly fulfilling is who I work with.  Through equal parts self-selection and deliberate effort, my partners and I have created the kind of transparent, friction-free, trust-based working relationship that up until this point I had only read about.

The fact that we had all worked together before getting into this business helped, but over the past five years we’ve had to make our way through uncomfortable, difficult conversations that required egos to be set aside, and personalities to be parsed from the logic and data.  Everybody talks about this, it’s the first time I’ve experienced it first-hand.

That’s great, but actually making money in this business is getting incredibly hard.  The whole industry is in a state of transition and transformation.  Fred Wilson has done a good job explaining this, but in short, it’s taking longer to get companies sold, the IPO market is dead, and the median valuations at sale have been declining for years.  In order to generate the returns institutional investors need, you’ve got to as a firm perform well above median.

It’s daunting.  We’re doing well as VCs, but looking at the whole industry it gives you pause.  This business will be getting smaller before it gets larger, and as I’ve written in an earlier post, the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place in industries who are in a state of transition.  And this is an industry in transition.

But that’s where the exciting part of this job is.  Transitions create no shortage of opportunity, and challenge.  I’m grateful I have the chance to put some more thought into this, during my long offsite.

Between now and when I “go off the grid” on the 4th, I’ll be posting on some related topics.

Tags:, ,
Posted in fear of not succeeding, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Strategy, Success, Values, Venture capital | 4 Comments »