Putting Perspective On Wealth - Al Gore

"Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore left the White House seven years ago with less than $2 million in assets, including a Virginia home and the family farm in Tennessee."

Leaving aside all that Al Gore's done since leaving office, which is a lot, think about all of the people with similar wealth making less of an impact.

Food for thought.

Via Paul Kedrosky, via Bloomberg

BrandVerity - Picks & Shovels Of Ecommerce

BrandVerity is a new Seattle startup offering a clear product that addresses a real pain point for brand managers on the web. It's about trademark abuse, and not the wishy-washy kind either - the kind of trademark abuse that directly takes money out of the pockets of trademark holders.

Target customers do not equivocate - 'Yes, I need that. Yes, I want to pay money for that.'

I can't speak highly enough about the team behind this.

You can find out lots more about BrandVerity here.

Barack Obama On Foreign Policy

We then asked, well, what about foreign policy -- should we be concerned that you just don't have much experience there?

First, he said, I'm on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where I serve with a number of Senators who are widely regarded as leading experts on foreign policy -- and I can tell you that I know as much about foreign policy at this point as most of them.

From Marc Andreessen

Clarity Of Thought - Hertzberg

Hendrik Hertzberg succinctly contrasts a recent speech made by Barack Obama with one by Hillary Clinton:

"Good writing can sometimes reflect clarity of thought"

Great Expectations & P.G. Johnson

Far and away, my favorite aspects of blist as a company are our great expectations, high standards, and immodest goals. In fact, ‘favorite’ is much too weak a word; I do not thrive in any environment lacking these. I have many (too many?) intense interests to distract me from an environment with obviously limited upside potential. This quality can make my life excruciatingly difficult at times, but with perspective is, on balance, a good thing.

A lot of the reason that I am the way (PITA some might say) that I am stems from my family history. My grandfather, P.G. Johnson, managed to be both enormously and precociously successful in business as well as contributing very centrally to history and progress. P.G. was a pioneer of the modern, professional CEO role during the nineteen-thirties and forties before dying too young. You can read more about him on Wikipedia, here and through the external links on that page.

Having this sort of role-model as a forbear cuts both ways. On the one hand, it’s inspirational and confidence building; At least I know I have the genes for success, however small a role they play, and believe me, I can dream big. On the other hand, as a progressive (one who subscribes to the idea of progress), I feel that I ought to, in summation, do more. Now, I don’t necessarily expect to have quite so much business success as my grandfather, but I need to prove a significant amount of it - and here’s where it starts getting tricky. I need to simultaneously be able to live a long and balanced life - something he did not do - and contribute to the world in some possibly broader and more public spirited ways. Definitely the environment, definitely human rights, definitely foreign affairs/understanding, perhaps elected office. Basically, to leave a mark, so that I couldn’t say that I might as well have never been born. And that can feel like a heavy weight from time to time, while paradoxically, the way to accomplishing all those things is just to energetically get on with it. And I try to do that - most of the time.

blist - killin' it

Was at a party on Saturday afternoon with a bunch of Seattle startup people, some of whom I knew already, some of whom I met for the first time.

The reactions to blist ranged from: 'You guys are the hot startup in Seattle', to 'You guys are totally killin' it'.

On the inside, all we tend to see/think about are all the things that haven't been, but need to be, done yesterday. It's nice to get a little bit of outside perspective from time to time.

PS

Unfortunately, it is about 5:30 am right now, and I have been up since about 3 am - I need to figure out a non-pharmacological way to start sleeping better, because it has been a long time since I've had much luck with that :(

Kayak, Farecompare, Beirut

Kayak's buzz is a great feature - it keeps me coming back to the site, time and again. Maddeningly, though - Kayak doesn't let you select the Middle East as a region choice, it skips directly from 'Europe' to 'Asia'. This is where Farecompare takes a better approach - just type in any specific city pair without a date range. And who knew how cheap it is to get to Beirut right now . . . itchy, itchy mouse-clicking finger . . .