myShoggoth

Announcing LearnVC.com

Today we've launched LearnVC.com, a site to help people understand the intricacies of startups, startup financing, the venture capital world, and related subjects.

I'm working on this with my brother, Jeff Boardman, who brings the domain expertise and is running the business, acquiring and creating the content, and maintaining the blog.

My responsibilities are on the more technical side, particularly around the example web widgets and the beta capitalization table that is a fascinating part of the future of the idea.

The cap table itself is a GWT application and is only client side for right now.  I've been working on fleshing out the features and making it handle more and more financial instruments and interesting terms that are used in the VC world, once that is closer to completion I will work on saving the data, sharing it with others, etc.  If you have feature ideas please do not hesitate to let us know.

Everything is a bit rough, but we're at the point where getting feedback and making changes based on that is much more important than creating something in a vacuum and hoping we got it right.   We'll add more content, features for the cap table, and the example widgets in the articles (which use the same code as the cap table).  We're starting the long road of rapid updates and improvements.

No Coasting

I was going through my morning routine today when it struck me that there's a parallel between the Talent vs. Skill idea I wrote up a while back and how I approached grooming and hygiene for the longest time.  I figured if I needed to work at it then it wasn't real, so I took poor care of myself in terms of health (and fitness) as well as grooming and hygiene.

I've made a big shift recently to realize that you are what you work to become, and what you're born with is only the raw materials you have available, not the predetermine end result.

I spent a lot of time with a close friend while I was in Colorado, and one of the things that I'm so impressed about with her is what she's made of herself, how hard she's worked at it, and the incredible results.

Similarly, when I look at what my wife has consciously worked on for the last few years to become, and the progress she's made, I'm blown away.

I'm much earlier along, still trying to determine what I want to make of myself, but a big change is that I'm consciously doing so, and not coasting anymore.

This is a reason why I think consulting is a great fit for me in general, and in particular right now.  I can't coast, I need to impress my clients every day.  At a big company, it is far too easy to coast.

Time to redouble my efforts about consciously working to make myself better at what I do for a living, which is happily one of the things I love to do.  No coasting.