terrygold.com

Fail Good video with Brad Feld

This is one of many videos recorded of Brad Feld while he was visiting us at the Centre for Business Growth in Adelaide, Australia.  My Australian friends tell me that people here are much less tolerant of "failure" than in the US.  They say that you may not get to try again if something doesn't work here.  I'm not sure that's true, but it wouldn't be a healthy attitude for entrepreneurship if it was true.  I heard Brad say multiple times that he would invest in people who had "failed" as long as they were honest and learned from their experience.  We also talked quite a bit about what failure even is, or what a success is, and it's not just measured by return on investment.  That certainly is an important measure, but not the only measure.

 

Brad is being interviewed by Felicia Trewin from ANZ, who is one of our sponsors at the Centre for Business Growth.  They are great supporters of businesses and entrepreneurs!

If you would like to see more videos of Brad, check out his blog here at feld.com.  It was fun to spend a week with him here in Adelaide!  Thanks Brad!

Meeting of the Minds Event, Boulder 4/4

I have been the Entrepreneur in Residence at the Temple Grandin School, and it's been a great experience working with the students and helping the staff think about the school as a startup.  They are a great organization doing important work with kids who are on the Autism spectrum.  The kids and young adults at TGS are all bright and interesting people, and many will go on to be engineers, entrepreneurs and artists.

On April 4th, 2016 the school is sponsoring an event with Temple Grandin herself, Phil McKinney who Vanity Fair named the “The Innovation Guru".  New York Times best selling author David Finch's will be there and his quick wit and keen insights on living with Asperger's Syndrome have captivated audiences across the nation. 

We have invited all three of these fascinating people to help us mark the Five Year Anniversary of Temple Grandin School the evening of Monday, April 4th, 2016.  

Please join us for a moderated conversation and reception at the beautiful eTown Hall in Boulder.  The topic of the evening will be neurodiversity - different kinds of minds.  Frasca Food and Wine will be serving delicious small bites complemented by delightful wines and local craft brews.  There will be an opportunity for VIP ticket holders to attend a private reception with the speakers before the talk.

Help us celebrate Autism Awareness Month and the Five Year Anniversary of TGS by attending the  "Meeting of the Minds" on 4/4/16!

Detailed Event Info:

http://templegrandinschool.org/?event=meeting-of-the-minds

Buy Tickets:

http://www.eventbrite.com/e/meeting-of-the-minds-cultivating-a-neurodiverse-workplace-tickets-21048391305

 

 

terrygold.com on Kindle

I didn't realize that Amazon was publishing my blog on the Kindle until this weekend when I got the following email from them . . .

Dear Publisher,

We noticed your blog (listed below) has not updated for more than 60 days. Kindle customers expect to receive frequent updates for blogs and news feeds to which they subscribe. Because blogs should update at least once per month, we are cancelling blogs that have not updated in more than 60 days. Accordingly, if you do not publish new updates within 7 days, we will remove your publication from the Kindle Store.

Blog Title: terrygold.com | Blog ASIN: B002A7WC20

Sincerely,

Amazon Kindle Team

I think I remember signing up when the Kindle first came out, but it was still a surprise to see that my blog has an ASIN number!

I suppose this post counts as an update, but in anycase I do have some new things to write about so I'll be doing another few posts soon.

Testing Live Writer

After fooling with Typepad again, I've decided to give Windows Live Writer a try.

 

Nice!  I'm done testing for awhile now.

Technorati Tags: microsoft,live,writer,typepad

An introduction to my new friend and Editor at Large

I can't quite reconstruct when I first met her, and to be totally accurate, I haven't met her yet, but some months ago Verna Wilder left her first comment on my blog.  In July, she left another comment and I found her blog for the first time.  Wow.  <---  I put that link in with full knowledge that you might not get back to this post.  That's fine, it happens to me all the time.  Tonight I found myself reading about Zen Koans for 20 minutes thanks to Verna's latest post.)

I admire Verna's writing ability, but I especially admire her honesty and willingness to say what she's thinking.  I find now that I save her posts for when I have the time to appreciate the work that goes into them.  (I assume she works at it, but then maybe she just dashes it off and the words just fall perfectly into place.)  Verna loves writing and it shows.

Verna has a new business as a copy-editor that's doing well, even though she's agreed to be my Editor At Large, for . . . well . . . free.  Or at least I haven't received a bill yet.  The deal is that she reads my posts when she gets a chance, and then points out the most obvious errors.  If you read one of my posts right after I write it, and you find a mistake, then it is mine, not hers.  Thank you Verna - I'm not a good enough writer myself to describe your writing, but I enjoy it very much and I appreciate that you are putting it out in public for others to enjoy.

Windows Mobile client for Typepad

Typepad.com just released a client for posting to blogs for Windows Mobile devices (and Palm and Symbian). It's basic, but it seems to work. You can get it right from your device at http://get.typepad.com

If I had it earlier this week in New York I would have done a play-by-play update from SpeechTEK.

Video Blog

A lot of people have asked how I did the video blog.  I'll do another one soon and talk more about it, but I used a piece of software from Serious Magic call Vlogit!  I used a webcam that I had already and a green sheet of plastic paper clipped to my window shades as my green screen - just like they do on TV.

Serious Magic has a partnership with Playstream to do the video hosting and I had a choice between putting it up as Flash or Media Player.  I used Flash this time and I'll try Media Player next.  It was not quite perfect but it was pretty easy for the price of $49.  I've just scratched the surface of what it can do - I think someone who knew something about video production could put together a great looking piece for very little money.

Feedburner and Google Adsense

Feedburner has announced that they are supporting Google Adsense ads.  I'm curious about where this is all going so I'm going to try and enable Adsense on my blog just to see what happens.  I'll be watching it to see if it works and to see what sort of ads google comes up with.  Feel free to comment or email me if it gets annoying or does something stupid.  I've set it to only kick in on posts of 100 words or more, so if I did everything write this one will get an ad. 

Woops, I need four more words. Have a great Holiday!

Denver Post on CEO Blogs

A few weeks ago I had an email conversation with Greg Griffin, a reporter for The Denver Post.  He was writing an article that ultimately was titled "Treading with caution in the blogsphere" and it is published here.  Greg suggests at the end of the article that if an employee writes something the employer doesn't like, they can be fired because in Colorado we are an "at-will employment state."  That's true I suppose but it sure isn't going to help with open communications with those that are left.

Since that article I've thought a lot about what I can and can't really say as a CEO.  I'm certainly going to try to avoid embarrassing anyone with my blog, myself included, unless they really deserve it - myself included.  So at times I may have to speak in more general terms about lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur.

Stephen Baker and Heather Green wrote a very good article in Businessweek on blogs and how they are evolving within business and changing the MSM (Main Stream Media).  It's worth reading if you are trying to figure out what all this blogging stuff is about.

In the end, blogging is just another new form of communications.  It would be interesting to graph the "new forms of communications" through history.  Maybe instead of the "computer revolution" or the "Internet Era" this time in history will be thought of as the "communications revolution".

Sleep Blogging

(This is number two in a series that I'll call Why Blog?)

My friend Tim Miller coined the term Sleep Working.  Or at least I heard it first from him.  When you wake up in the morning and you realize that you've been turning over a problem in your mind in your sleep, you're sleep working.  It doesn't even have to be a problem, though it often is, as on occasion I've woke up with what turns out to be a be a good idea.  Mostly though they tend to be problems and it isn't a very good feeling.  Thankfully either I'm having less problems or I'm learning to control it.  Sleep working is one of the dangers of being an entrepreneur that nobody tells you about before you quit your real job.

Lately I've noticed a variation that I'll call Sleep Blogging.  I wake up and realize that a story has been running through my head.  Today it was about how CEO blogging can be used as another form of communications to the company.  One of my board members is Brad Feld and he's been blogging since May of 04.  Almost from the beginning he used his blog to speak not just to all entrepreneurs, but specifically to the CEOs in his portfolio.  In effect, he'd say something like "I really like how this company runs their board meetings" and if you were that company I guess you felt good and if you thought you weren't that company, you'd try to get better.  (Assuming you've made the connection between good board meetings and board members who get the information they need.) 

I've believe that blogging can be a very different and useful form of communications, because it allows a guy like Brad to put out an idea without it sounding like a command.  I get insight into how he thinks, what he cares about and then I can take it (or leave it) to make my business better.  It's very different from getting a call from him saying "Gold, you need to do a better job of running your board meetings." 

This morning while sleep blogging I realized that this can work for me too.  There are people at my company who read my blog, and I can use it as a way to float ideas and help people better understand what I hope we can accomplish together.  It is in addition to, not a substitute for direct conversations, but I think that it is just one more method of improving communications which is one of the top battles for any entrepreneur or CEO.  We can all be better at communications.